


Three Times Andy Uses Her Mortality to Shield The Team

by No_Illusions



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Gen, Kidnapping, No Beta, Some depictions of violence, Temporary Character Death, Until she isn't, Whump, andy is mortal, casual attitudes towards death, casual attitudes towards kidnapping, hurt/comfort kinda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:15:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26076295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/No_Illusions/pseuds/No_Illusions
Summary: Three times Andy uses her mortality to shield the team, and one time it doesn't go quite as planned.
Comments: 17
Kudos: 216





	Three Times Andy Uses Her Mortality to Shield The Team

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Characters aren't mine. 
> 
> TW: Kidnapping, some violence/torture, injury, temporary character death, slight self-harm.
> 
> Author's note: Please note that this fic contains a mention of self-harm, although it is not self-harm for the sake of hurting oneself. Rather, Andy deliberately cuts herself in order to further their mission (she needs a band-aid afterwards).

1

The first time is a little thing, but that doesn’t stop the reminder from hurting. They need to infiltrate an old historical site to get some documents, but Copley said to be subtle, and subtlety always makes things significantly more complicated. 

The easiest way, they decide, is to have Andy and Nile take a tour, while Joe and Nicky conceal themselves in the trees with Nicky’s sniper rifle as backup. 

The only problem is, their tour guide is aggressively good. They can’t get more than a foot away from the tour group before being shepherded back, plied with some historical tidbit or another. From the faces Andy is making, Nile is pretty sure those historical tidbits are not particularly accurate. 

Just as Nile is about to give up and resign herself to learning everything there is to know about the motivations behind the decorations in each room of this house, Andy mutters “fuck this shit” and drops back slightly. 

“Cover me,” she says to Nile, and Nile automatically puts her body between Andy and any potential danger or prying eyes. When Nile glances behind her a moment later, she sees Andy slipping a knife back into her boot and then notices blood dripping down Andy’s wrist. 

“Oh my god, you’re _bleeding_!” Nile exclaims, realizing quickly what Andy’s doing. 

_Please don’t_ _shoot when you see blood_ , she thinks silently to Nicky. She knows Joe has his binoculars trained on them through the window. 

The tour guide lets out a horrified gasp, probably at the risk to the antique carpet more than anything else, and is on them in a flash, shepherding Andy towards a back room where the bandages are presumably kept. 

Nile waits a moment, then exclaims, “Oh, I should make sure she’s alright!” and follows after Andy and the guide, leaving the rest of the tourists stunned behind her. 

Nile gets the documents, Andy gets a bandaid. Joe and Nicky are not amused.

2

  
  


When the car bomb goes off, they’re way too close. They’re thrown back, and for a few moments all Nicky can hear is ringing in his ears. There’s a chance he died, but he can’t be sure. The adrenaline jerks him back to the real world soon enough, and he stumbles up, disoriented, calling for Joe, and Andy, and Nile. 

They answer slowly, one by one, but they’re all a mess, coated in dust and blood. There’s the wail of sirens in the distance, but Nicky’s still too out of it to care.

What seems like only a second later, there’s a group of first responders converging on them, checking them over. Nicky sees the moment when their eyes begin to widen, and the muttering starts. 

“Where’d all the blood come from?” one of them asks. “You’re not even injured.”

“It’s my blood,” says Andy calmly. Nicky spins, jerking away from the paramedic checking his pulse, and takes Andy in properly for the first time. 

“Andy!” he exclaims, seeing that she really is bleeding quite badly from multiple shrapnel wounds. 

She begins to sway, and all three of them lunge to catch her. 

“Get off,” she mutters, batting at them weakly, before promptly passing out. 

The paramedics swarm her, forgetting entirely about their other three miraculously uninjured patients. 

Andy’s fine, in the end, but the others are very unhappy.

3

They’re in Russia when the police snatch them off the street. 

They interrogate Andy first, probably because she’s the only one who can speak fluent Russian and they want answers, not confused strings of mostly gibberish. Joe, whose Russian is second-best, is pretty sure Nile said something about cows reading books when they tried asking her questions. 

They work Andy over with their fists, then leave them all to “think about their situation,” as Andy translates for them later. 

The next morning when they come back, Andy is rainbow with bruises and looks truly awful. She refuses to answer their questions. They break her ribs. 

A few hours later, when they manage to escape, the police are none the wiser that the prisoners they just had and lost were three immortals and one seven thousand year old ex-goddess.

Nile bandages up Andy’s ribs as Nicky and Joe hover. No one is happy, not even Andy.

4

_I’m going to kill Copley,_ Nile thinks as she jerks on the chains that are holding her hands behind her back and her ankles together. 

She’s not entirely sure this is Copley’s fault, actually, but certainly it was Copley’s mission and now the four of them are chained up in a literal abandoned warehouse, and Nile is simply going to mark this one down as Copley’s fault and leave it at that. 

When their captors come for them, Joe, Nicky, and Nile all glare stonily. Andy looks like she’s trying to glare, but also… like she might cry? Nile blinks in confusion. And then Andy shrinks away from the men coming towards them, and _whimpers._ Nile’s never heard her make that sound before, even last month when Nile was stitching up a stab wound in Andy’s side with no painkillers available. 

The men coming towards them exchange glances, and make a beeline straight for Andy. 

_Oh god,_ Nile thinks. _These men are going to kill Andy, then I’m going to kill them, and then Joe, Nicky, and I are going to have a grief-filled party where we get really drunk and kill Copley together. It will be like a team-bonding experience, except that Andy will be dead because she can’t heal and she insists on getting herself tortured to death._

Nile can’t say she doesn’t know what Andy’s doing. Things always get so much more complicated when people see they heal and can’t die, and they have to be very careful to kill all hostile witnesses on the way out. It’s stressful and inconvenient and quite annoying. But these men won’t think twice about killing Andy when she doesn’t give them what they want, and moving on to the rest of them. Unless they can escape before Andy dies, it will be a useless sacrifice, and Nile is very pissed off about the whole thing. 

Nile, Joe, and Nicky are all yelling, trying desperately to redirect focus onto themselves and away from the most fragile member of their team. But all the three of them have is anger and fear and desperation, and Andy has nearly seven thousand years of experience manipulating people and situations, and is putting on a truly impressive performance. 

The men are laughing and jostling each other as they come for her, and Nile snarls at them. 

It takes six of them to drag Andy away and string her up on a hook hanging from the ceiling. Then one of the men slaps her across the face to get her to stop whimpering and begging them to let her go, and another one grabs a knife and slashes into her stomach. Andy gasps in pain, and then the men gasp as well. 

“Oh my god,” one of them exclaims. “She’s _healing_!”

Nile’s exclamation of “She’s _what?_ ” couldn’t have sounded more genuine if it had been delivered by the best actor in history. 

Nicky and Joe freeze. 

Andy stops pretending to cower away from her captors, and stares down at herself in shock. 

“Andromache,” Nicky whispers, his voice reverent. Joe is grinning ear-to-ear. 

Andy looks up at them, and Nile’s breath catches in her throat. She looks _happy_.

_She wants to live, and now she gets to,_ Nile thinks to herself, and promptly bursts into tears.

_

It takes them longer to escape than it should have, because they’re stumbling through this kidnapping in complete shock. The men beat Andy for twenty more minutes, using knives and fists, and the whole time Andy ignores them, which frustrates them to no end. Andy looks dazed, and occasionally looks down at herself in awe. 

“Could you _stop_ hurting her?” Joe calls, but he sounds more exasperated than scared, and suddenly Nile’s giggling hysterically and Nicky joins in, and then _Andy’s_ laughing as one of them slices down her side, and that’s the last straw for them apparently, because they stalk over to Joe and grab him. 

And Joe fights, because it doesn’t _matter_ if he gets hurt, it doesn’t matter if they kill him, none of it matters, they can do whatever they want and the four of them will walk out of here together. He gets shot three times, and dies once, but he wakes up immediately, and Nile can tell Nicky’s not thrilled about the dying part, but they’re all riding on such a giddy high that it just doesn’t matter, and then the guards are dead and Joe’s unlocking their cuffs and they’re all _flying_ towards Andy. 

Joe grabs her in a hug and lifts her up like Nile’s seen him do when he hasn’t seen her in awhile, and Nicky unhooks her hands, and Nile unlocks the cuffs, and then they’re all hugging and laughing and if they all shed a few tears certainly none of them will mention it. 

“Now we don’t have to get drunk and murder Copley!” Nile exclaims, and no one is as confused by this sentence as they should be, but Andy latches on to the most important part. 

“Okay, but can we still get drunk?” she asks. 

And Joe answers, “Anything for you, sweetheart,” and there is such _tenderness_ in his voice that Nile thinks the purity and love of this moment might break her. 

And later, on their way to the bar, if the others notice her sending a quick text to a number that looks suspiciously like Booker’s, they don’t say anything about it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
